Satanism and Psychotherapy: A Rumor in Search of an Inquisition

Abstract

This chapter describes changes in the theory and practice of psychotherapy that have shaped mental health professionals' belief in the satanic cult conspiracy rumor, as well as methods used to propagate this belief in the mental health profession. It focuses on alleged adult survivors and their therapists because they have provided most ostensibly authoritative descriptions of the organization, motivation, and finality of the elusive conspiratorial satanic blood-cult network. Satanism and satanic cults were already a subject of informal conversation among clinicians and patients by 1985. In reality, satanic ritual abuse conferences are not asking clinicians to believe what patients are saying, but to believe that these patients' silence results from their having been brainwashed by an elusive conspiratorial blood cult. Herbert Spiegel studied the behavioral characteristics of a large cohort of highly hypnotizable subjects who presented no significant clinical symptoms. In 1984, the First International Conference on Multiple Personality/Dissociative States was organized in Chicago.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 45 citations exist upstream.